Wayward Son - Rainbow Rowell Page 0,76
that argument won’t work with him. Instead I say, “Because I didn’t enjoy being bitten.”
He glances over at me, turning his head this time. “Then someone was doing it wrong.”
I shuffle in my seat. “It just feels barbaric to me. Why should I turn on humanity? I was born one of them.”
“It’s the natural way of things,” he says. “It’s the circle of life.”
“There’s no circle,” I say. “We don’t die. We aren’t born. We don’t reproduce.”
“We do,” Lamb insists. “We were. We can.”
It’s my turn to be put off. “Vampires have children?”
“Someone made you.”
“My parents made me. A vampire killed me.”
He sighs. “Then allow me to say how much I enjoy the company of your ghost.”
I look out the window. I don’t see Shepard’s truck in the mirror.
“It might not be the circle of life,” Lamb says. “But it is the food chain. I didn’t see you feeling sorry for that pig we had for lunch. Or the rabbit you had for dessert. Everything eats something else.”
I swing my head towards him. “What eats you?”
He raises an eyebrow, giving me a taste of my own medicine. “Existential despair.”
I laugh out loud.
His eyes rest on me for a moment before turning back to the road. And when he speaks again, his voice is soft. “You won’t feel so close to them, the Normals, once you’ve outlived your ties to mortality.… Someday, your parents will be gone. Your lovers will be gone. Everything left from the time when you bled will fade … and fall … and disappear. And then you’ll realize that you’re something different. There’s no unbecoming, Baz. There’s no sidestepping your true identity. All the rabbits in the world won’t change you back. They’ll just leave you thirsty.”
Neither of us talk for a moment. I’m grateful he’s driving. It keeps him from watching me.
Finally I say, “You must be very lucky.”
Lamb tilts his head, waiting.
“To have found the only vampire in Las Vegas who’ll listen to your speeches.”
He bursts into laughter.
* * *
Lamb lives at the Katherine. He has a flat near the top, clearly decorated with his own furniture. (There’s no black leather. And no black cockatiels.) There’s a sitting area at one end and what looks like a bedroom behind a cloudy glass wall.
I sit on an antique sofa covered in turquoise jacquard. Lamb sits near me in a chair built of elaborately carved wood. It looks very old; everything here does. He’s taken off his jacket. “So,” he says, “I gather you weren’t given a choice.…”
I know what he means. “It doesn’t matter.”
“It matters to me, as your new friend.”
“I was not given a choice,” I say, brushing a white rabbit hair off my trousers. “Were you?”
“I predate choice,” he says, pushing his hair out of his face with both hands.
“How so?”
He lets his hair fall. “I predate everything. All my people understood was war and hunger, and demons who came in the dark.”
“Is that what happened to you? Did a demon come in the dark?” I’m not used to thinking of vampires like this, as fellow victims.
“It’s what happened to my brother,” he says. “Then my brother came for me.”
“Because he wanted a comrade?”
“Because he was thirsty. Because he’d already killed our parents. I put a table leg through his heart before he could finish me off, too.”
We’re both quiet.
“I’m sorry,” I say finally.
“It wasn’t his fault—he had no one to teach him. He had no community.” Lamb leans forward, his forearms on his thighs. “The culture that we’ve built here is hundreds of years in the making. We’ve lifted ourselves up. What happened to you—what happened to me—that isn’t our way anymore.”
“So you don’t Turn people?”
“Rarely. Most of us don’t want the chaos and competition. Almost no one wants the responsibility.”
“Then why don’t you stop the Next Blood?”
“There’s been talk.…”
“Just talk?”
“It’s difficult to persuade our kind into a war,” he says. “The longer you live, the more you value your life. You start treating yourself like a precious antiquity.”
“Are you sure you’re not just sitting back, waiting to see if the Next Blood can figure out how to steal magic?”
Lamb smiles, grimly. “If I thought they’d share it, I’d consider it. But they have no interest in us or our history. They don’t even identify as our brethren.”
“They don’t identify as vampires?”
“Oh no, they’re the next stage of humanity. Go on, tell me—why do they have your friend?”
“I’m not sure.”
“What’s his name?”
“Agatha.”
Lamb’s eyebrow twitches. “Ah.”
I stop myself from saying, “It’s not like that.”
“What